Overview

The pharaohs spent three thousand years and untold fortunes trying to defeat death-building pyramids, mummifying bodies, carving their names in stone, paying priests to chant forever, creating the most elaborate immortality project in human history. They failed. Spectacularly. Their bodies ended up in museums, their religion died, their language went extinct, and their monuments became tourist attractions where visitors take selfies. This book tells the story of that failure-how divine god-kings became museum exhibits, how the biggest tombs in history got robbed anyway, how desperate preservation attempts created the world's first protection racket, and why Tutankhamun (a nobody who died at nineteen) became more famous than Ramses II (who ruled for sixty-six years and never shut up about it). From Victorian mummy-unwrapping parties to modern repatriation battles, from Napoleon's army of looters to the invention of Egyptology, from Hollywood curse movies to Las Vegas pyramid casinos, this is ancient Egypt stripped of mysticism and romance-a civilization that tried harder than anyone to be remembered forever, succeeded at being remembered, and lost complete control of what we remember about them. The river still flows north. The monuments still stand. The echoes came back all wrong. And that's the only immortality anyone gets.

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